Friday, 30 May 2014

Applications for the
sixth M Literary Residency Programme, 2015-2016, are now open. The Residency Programme funds residencies for
two writers, one in India and one in China - a three month stay either in
Shanghai or at Sangam House, outside Bangalore.

Brainchild ofM Restaurant Groupfounder Michelle Garnaut and award
winning author Pankaj Mishra, the residencies are fully funded by M Restaurant
Group, which has two restaurants and a bar in China: M on the Bund and the
Glamour Bar in Shanghai; Capital M in Beijing.

Cultural events are
a core part of the M Group's ethos: there are talks, concerts and events
throughout the year. The Group also
hosts major annual literary festivals in Beijing and Shanghai - these have become
highlights of the cities’ cultural calendars.

“The residencies grew from our literary festivals, as we
heard from writers about what else was needed to nurture and produce the best
writing in this region,” says Michelle. So what is Michelle looking for
from applicants? “First,
and always, quality writing and a topic that will benefit from the location,
and a writer whose work will fulfil the goals of the residencies, specifically to
disseminate a broader knowledge of contemporary life and writing in India and
China today and to foster deeper intellectual, cultural and artistic links
across individuals and communities. Those are our ambitions for next year,
and, really, for every year.”

The residencies are open
to writers of fiction, literary nonfiction, dramatic prose, and poetry,
writing in English.

Previous residency
recipients include emerging and unpublished authors, as well as more
established names. For bios and the writers’ thoughts on their residency
experience, as well as application forms, guidelines and frequently asked
questions clickhere.

Thursday, 29 May 2014

On
June 4, 1989, People’s Liberation Army soldiers opened fire on unarmed
civilians in Beijing, killing untold hundreds of people. A quarter-century later, Louisa Lim charts how the events of June 4th changed
China, and how China changed the events of June 4th by rewriting its own
history.

This book reveals new details about the fateful
days in Tiananmen Square including how one of the country’s most senior
politicians lost a family member to an army bullet, and uncovers the inside
story of the young soldiers sent to clear Tiananmen Square. Louisa Lim introduces us to the individuals
whose lives were transformed by the events of Tiananmen Square. For example,
one of the most important government officials in the country became one of its
most prominent dissidents post-Tiananmen.

For the first time, Lim exposes the details of a
brutal crackdown in a second Chinese city, Chengdu. By tracking down eyewitnesses,
discovering US diplomatic cables, and combing through official Chinese records,
Lim offers the first accessible, English-language account of a story that has remained mostly untold for
twenty-five years.

Louisa Lim began her journalistic career in Hong Kong, and was later appointed as the BBC's Beijing Correspondent. She has reported from China for
the past decade, most recently as NPR's Beijing Correspondent. She has made a very rare reporting trip to North Korea,
covered illegal abortions in Guangxi province, and worked on a major
multimedia series on religion in China, New Believers: A Religious
Revolution in China.

Early praise for The People’s
Republic of Amnesia…

“A deeply moving
book—thoughtful, careful, and courageous. The portraits and stories it contains
capture the multi-layered reality of China, as well as reveal the sobering
moral compromises the country has made to become an emerging world power, even
one hailed as presenting a compelling alternative to Western democracies. Yet
grim as these stories and portraits sometimes are, they also provide glimpse of
hope, through the tenacity, clarity of conscience, and unflinching zeal of the
dissidents, whether in China or in exile, who against all odds yearn for a
better tomorrow.”

–Shen Tong, former student activist and
author of Almost a Revolution

“Astonishingly Beijing has managed to
obliterate the collective memory of Tiananmen Square, but a
quarter-century later Louisa Lim deftly excavates long-buried memories of the
1989 massacre. With a journalist's eye to history, she tracks down key witnesses,
everyone from a military photographer at the square to a top official
sentenced to seven years in solitary confinement to a mother whose teenaged son
was shot to death that night. This book is essential reading for understanding
the impact of mass amnesia on China's quest to become the world's next economic
superpower.”

–Jan Wong, author of Red China Blues and A Comrade Lost and
Found

People's Republic of Amnesia is published in hardback by OUP, priced in local currencies.

Wednesday, 28 May 2014

The world of self-publishing
can be a tortuous and labyrinthine place to the uninitiated. For the less
well-travelled writer, a comforting path to self-publication is sometimes
offered by joining forces with a writers’ group.

Formed
in 1991, the Hong Kong Writers Circle (HKWC) is one such organisation with writers
of all levels, from all genres. Amongst its members are professional writers as
well as those who work in the publishing industry, journalists and editors.
Many members have themselves published books.

The
Circle exists primarily as a social group with monthly meetings where authors
can critique others’ work, but it also provides opportunities for writers to further
their craft; to network and meet industry professionals; receive feedback on
their work; and to take part in workshops. And once a year, it publishes an
anthology of short stories, non-fiction and poetry.

Yearly elected editors
are responsible for everything to do with the anthology - from theme conception
to marketing the book once it’s been published. The theme of the anthology is chosen
via consultation with a combination of those editors, the organising committee
and the members themselves. The theme tries to be specific, but at the same
time broad enough for members with different styles and interests to want to
contribute. All members of the group are invited to submit to the anthology
with the editors deciding ultimately which pieces are published.

The latest anthology
published by the HKWC has the theme of Another
Hong Kong – delving into an unknown side of the city where the writers live. It explores aspects of the place hidden from the traditions and clichés a reader may expect.

For the past few
years Inkstone Books have printed the anthologies. This means that the group has
had the same copy-editor, designer and printer for most of the anthologies. The
current chair, Melanie Ho, says that because the editors change every year, it
is helpful to have the same partners working with the production of the anthology
year after year.

Melanie describes the
publication process of the anthology as a learning experiences for editors and
authors alike. It is the production of the book which floats their junk, rather
than traipsing around bookstores and actively marketing its sales. Having said
that, some of the writers involved produce blogs documenting the whole process
and carry copies of the books wherever they go - in order to make sure they never
miss a sales opportunity!

Most of the sales of
the anthology are print copies in Hong Kong, although they also use print-on-demand
through Amazon - as well as eBook sales. The group uses print runs conservatively
– usually 200 or 300 copies at a time – although some of the anthologies are
now into their second or third print runs.

The HKWC exists to provide opportunities for writers in the
city to grow and develop their craft. The
yearly anthology is a large part of this and offers a safe launching pad for
authors to experiment in the field.

Another Hong Kong can
be purchased from Amazon or at www.paddyfield.com.

Monday, 26 May 2014

The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim, has won the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction
Prize. The Iraqi Christ is a collection of
short stories that explore Iraq’s recent past, sensitively translated from the
original Arabic by Jonathan Wright.

Publication of The Iraqi Christ was made possible by English PEN. Each
year English PEN highlights global writing of exceptional literary merit and
courage. It awards grants to fund both the promotion and translation costs of
books from around the world to ensure they reach English-speaking readers

UK-based publisher Comma Press received a PEN Writers in Translation award in
2012 for The Iraqi Christ. Blasim’s previous collection of short
stories, The Madman of Freedom Square, also received a PEN
award in 2009.

A poet, filmmaker and short-story writer, Blasim is the first Arab author to
receive the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The Iraqi Christ is
also the first short-story collection to win the award.

A censored version of The Madman of Freedom Square was printed
and published in Lebanon. The book was banned in Jordan, and refused display at
book fairs in several Arab countries. The Iraqi Christ is yet
to be published in its original Arabic. Hassan Blasim commented: ‘I now
publish most of my stories and poems online and I have started thinking about
publishing everything I write on the net in order to be done with the matter of
censorship.’

Maureen Freely, president of
English PEN said: ‘At English PEN we support work in translation on the basis
of its literary merit. Where writers are marginalised, demonised, or
suppressed, we do our best to rescue their words from oblivion. We do not seek
prizes or fat sales, and there are days when we feel as tired as Sisyphus, but
on days like today, when we see that one of our very favourite authors
receiving recognition, it all seems worth it!’

Ra Page, publisher at Comma
Press said: ‘Winning this award is an extraordinary vindication for everything
English PEN does to support writers from the margins, and to give voice to
authors who might otherwise remain unheard. Hassan's work is the perfect example
of how the experiences of Iraqis, and of refugees generally, have to be
smuggled in through extraordinary routes.'

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is administered by The Independent, a daily newspaper in the UK. See here for the paper’s coverage of Hassan Blasim’s victory.

Asian Review of Bookshas
recently posted Ryan Brooks’ review of Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival by David Pilling,
which was our new and notable title for April.
Click here for the review.

If surveillance is a major sticking point of
political debate in the West, it’s a reality for thousands whose lives have
been transformed at its hands in South East Asia. Far from being a hypothetical
threat - the subject of column inches whose affects are rarely felt -
governments in China, Vietnam, Thailand and of course, North Korea, are using
surveillance software not just in the name of upholding national security, but
to police and doctor freedom of expression.

Last week, the Asia House Literature Festival brought together three pivotal spokespeople to discuss the
issue of spy software and surveillance in East Asia. Giles Ji Ungpakorn is a former professor at the Faculty of Political
Science at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, who was forced into exile after
staging a protest in opposition to the military coup of 2006. Today he works as
an administrative clerk at a hospital in Oxford, while writing extensively on
the injustices of the Thai political system and rallying resistance to the
country’s oppressive censorship laws amongst its student population. Gigi Alford of Freedom House, a US-based NGO advocating freedom of expression,
democracy and human rights, joined him, as well as Gus Hosein of Privacy International. The talk was chaired by Director of English PEN Jo Glanville.

For the audience whose knowledge on this
subject seemed varied, Alford began by outlining the ten possible forms of
surveillance: firewalls; attacks against regime credits; lawmaking to prevent
political speech online; paid pro-government commentators; physical attacks;
take-down requests; forced deletions; blanket blocking of domains; campaigns to
‘clean the web’ and the threat of shutting down mobile Internet services. All
ten techniques are being used in China where conformity to the government’s
ethos is so pervasive that it has engendered a climate of self-censorship as widespread
and as damaging to transparency as that which is imposed.

And while the suppression of feeling
contrary to a government agenda is a flagrant assault on democracy, more
shocking are instances of entrapment. As in the case of Vietnamese human rights
lawyer Nguyen Bac Truyen, who gave free legal assistance to victims of land
grabs, and campaigned for multi-party democracy before realising too late that
his private correspondence with clients had been hacked. Bac Truyen was
attacked on his way to the Australian embassy in Hanoi and his house
subsequently surrounded by the city’s Dong Thap police.

Vietnam is second only to China in the
number of bloggers targeted in one form or another by authorities. Since Decree
72 came into effect last year, citizens have been banned from discussing
current affairs online.

To Alford’s initial list, Hosein added
three more techniques that are currently being developed by software companies
in the West and exported to Asia. These
included National surveillance centres, capable of monitoring information being
shared within and across a country’s borders; as well as IMSI-catchers –
wearable, fake mobile towers that act between the service providers’ own and
target devices to collect data. At just over US$ 8,400 it is one of the more
widely available forms of surveillance hardware on the market.

Finally Hosein cited FinFisher, the
software made notorious by Wikileaks and developed by Lench IT solutions, with
a UK branch Gamma International based in Andover. It enables users to access
calls, as well as switch on the microphone and camera of target mobile phones.
That the use of this software is being justified by governments as a means of
chilling dissident speech is frankly absurd, given users remain entirely
oblivious to the fact they are being targeted.

While the UK has granted asylum to activists
such as Ungpakorn, its role in the widespread use of surveillance technology
not just on home turf, but in the East, is considerable. And the same goes for
other Western states. After all, it is here that most surveillance software was
pioneered and continues to be developed, and it is here that the precedent of
questionable surveillance policies is being set. Think back to Nokia issuing
the Iranian government technology to monitor phone calls in 2009 and you’ll be
reminded of how Western techniques have been exported to the detriment of
innocent civilians across the world.

At the present moment, few solutions exist
to the problem of surveillance. Amazon web services offer users the possibility
of privacy with their ‘https’ service, although this is only permitted while
the company does not have a physical presence inside a given territory. With
the arrival of Amazon’s first China-based office later this year, it’s safe to
say that the services availability inside the country will soon be diminished.

“Nobody’s a good guy anymore.” Gus told us.
“Intelligence agencies in the UK, in America, and soon elsewhere, can now mimic
the user interface of companies such as Facebook and Linkedin without users
knowing."

Then there’s the worry of tech-savvy
activists eventually applying their expertise to exacerbate the situation
further. Let’s not forget, that many of those who set up the Stasi, went on to create
the sorts of companies that they once fought to resist.

With the 25th anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square protests now upon us, anti-government feeling is expected to
arise in a big way across China. Blocks are inevitable and the feelings of many
will be suppressed, hidden and deleted from the annals of micro-blogging sites.
Awareness can get people so far, but the systems at work to prevent freedom of
expression are becoming increasingly impenetrable. In 2011 Egyptian activist Wael
Ghonim said during a CNN interview days before President Mubarak was toppled, “If
you want a free society just give them Internet access.”

Make that a free Internet, for the web is
becoming a form of incarceration whose long term effects can likely be
predicted by observing the activity that is already taking place across so many
Eastern states.

Wednesday, 14 May 2014

500 Words From...is a series of guest posts
from authors, in which they talk about their newly-published books. Here Ann Bennett explains the
background behind Bamboo Heart, published in paperback today byMonsoon Books.

Ann Bennett is a UK-based novelist and
lawyer.

Set in South East Asia both in the present and before and during the Second
World War, Bamboo Heart captures the
suffering and courage of prisoners of war of the Japanese. It tells the story
of Tom Ellis, a prisoner enslaved on the infamous Death Railway in Thailand,
and charts the journey of his daughter, Laura, who turns her back on her comfortable lifestyle in eighties London to investigate her father's wartime experience.

So: 500 Words From Ann Bennett

At the end of the Second World War allied intelligence services surveyed newly-released prisoners of war with so-called liberation questionnaires. My novel, Bamboo
Heart, started life when I discovered my father’s liberation questionnaire in Britain's National Archives. It was an amazing moment when I first saw it;
written in his perfect copper-plate hand, it answered so many questions I would
like to have asked. From that moment I knew I had to write about his
experiences as a prisoner-of-war on the Death Railway in Thailand.

This
discovery was the culmination of a lifetime’s quest to find out what had
happened to my father during the war. He died when I was only seven, and
growing up I became increasingly interested in his past. He hardly spoke about
the war, having started a new life with my mother on his return to England in
1945. I was interested enough to travel to Kanchanaburi to see the railway in
1988. On that trip I fell in love with South East Asia, but found out very
little about what had happened to my father there.

I
took the tragic events Dad described in his questionnaire as the basis of Tom’s
story in Bamboo Heart. I wanted to write about those events from the
perspective of one man, within the framework of a fast-moving narrative. My aim
was to bring those events alive without it feeling like a history lesson.

The
events I was describing were harrowing. So to lighten the mood, I broke it up
with flashbacks to Tom’s pre-war life in colonial Penang, where he fell in
love. I also introduced a parallel modern plot, the story of Tom’s own
daughter’s search for the truth about the war. For Laura’s story I drew upon my
own life as a disaffected young lawyer in the eighties, and upon my memories of
those times. The novel touches on the Wapping Riots, famous in the UK, which I remember well. Co-incidentally
the first day of serious rioting was 15th February 1986, the
anniversary of the Fall of Singapore.

I
tried to tell a story of hope and survival, to examine the reasons why some
survived the worst of ordeals and others sadly did not. I also wanted to show
what an important role history plays in all our lives; how powerfully our
family’s past affects our own choices and values.

My
research for Bamboo Heart taught me so much more about the war in the Far East
than I had expected. I had not previously known how civilians suffered; about
starvation and massacres, about bravery and sacrifice. It inspired me to
explore those events from other angles and through other peoples’ stories.

Bamboo Heart is the first novel in a planned trilogy. I
have just finished writing Bamboo Island, about Juliet, a plantation owner’s
wife, who
has lived a reclusive life since the war robbed her of everyone she loved. The
sudden appearance of a stranger disrupts her lonely existence and stirs up
unsettling memories.

I’m also working on a
third novel: Bamboo Road, about of the daughter of a member of the Thai
resistance which tells how the influx of prisoners-of-war into that remote
jungle region affects her life.

Saturday, 10 May 2014

Akashic Books in New York
publishes a series of City Noir books,
each a multi-author anthology of crime short stories. Today, the
Singapore-based company, Monsoon Books, is publishing for the local market the
latest title in the series, Singapore Noir.

The anthology is divided into
four sections: Sirens; Love (Or Something Like It); Gods & Demons; The
Haves & The Have-Nots. Each story is
set in a particular location in Singapore, so, for example, Colin Goh’s Last Time is set in Raffles Place, and
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan’s Reel is set at
Changi

Singapore
Noir is published in
paperback. It is available from all leading bookstores in
Singapore, and the South East Asia region.
Priced in local currencies.